J o h a n n a B r a n s o n G i l l
I N T R O D U C T I O N
“Video was the most shared, the most democratic art form. . . . Everybody believed deeply that he had invented feedback. Feedback was invented simulta- neously not by five people, like electricity, but by five thousand.”
—Woody Vasulka
When one begins to think about video, it is important to keep in mind its immense flexibility as a medium. It is not only TV, the standard piece of American living room furniture, it is also a material for making electronic graphics, the surveillance system in the neighborhood supermarket, the training tool that shows all too instantly what kind of teacher or tennis player you are, and a means of documenting almost anything from the SLA burn- out in Los Angeles to a grandmother’s memories of her childhood. In other words, the video world is much larger than the art world, and people who make video art may have very diverse backgrounds in the medium. Consequently, the term “video art” does not describe any single unified style; it indi- cates a shared medium.
Most video art-making began in 1968 and 1969. The social and artistic ferment of those years had a great deal to do with the way the medium was first used. Nineteen sixty-eight also marks a technical watershed: it was the year portable, relatively inex- pensive television equipment came on the market, thus opening the medium to a vast new group of people. Although these people were interested in the equipment for many different reasons, most of them shared an acute dissatisfaction with broadcast tele- vision. They were unhappy with the monolithic nature of TV, with the control of three major net-
works, with the quality of programming—the lack of diverse content and the routine visual sameness of it all.
This reaction against broadcast television is usually discernible in much early video. Some ex- perimenters took their new light cameras out into the streets and to the countryside, recording people and social situations broadcast TV never would have bothered with. This group of people was con- cerned with exploring as rich an array of subjects as possible. They felt broadcast TV had developed bland programming in an effort to offend as few people as possible, attract high ratings, and thus command higher prices for advertising time. The alternative television people were not supported by advertising; they didn’t care about ratings. They were free to focus their cameras on anything, even things that would interest only the people living in a single neighborhood.
Others were concerned with electronics research and development. These people considered it ridicu- lous that the perfect television image was thought to be the smooth, glowing pink face of Walter Cronkite. Some of these experimenters come from a strong twentieth century graphic tradition of exploration with light imagery going back at least as far as the Futurists and the Bauhaus. Those who had been looking for a medium of moving, colored light were overjoyed to find that television could produce ab- stract images as easily as it could transmit a newscaster’s face. Some members of this group built new electronic circuitry to produce different imagery. These people are among the real pioneers of the medium; they are fascinated with the role technology plays in our society and are constantly searching for new ways to make this role visually manifest. They feel that the structure of electronic
tools reflects as well as informs our thinking, and by using tools that produce visual patterns, they hope to reveal to us our social and technological direc- tions.
Still another group was reacting against the one- directional flow of broadcast TV, which streams day after day into the homes of millions of people without providing the means for them to speak back equally directly. They pointed out that we have only receivers in our homes, not transmitters, and sometimes these people set up small, closed-circuit environments that contained both cameras and monitors. Often the earliest such environments held banks of monitors; one could see one’s own image (being picked up by cameras in the room) on monitors next to others showing programs coming off the air. In this manner, a viewer could explore the idea that his or her image was as interesting as that of a quiz-show personality. Many of those who created environments were fundamentally inter- ested in the nature of visual and aural information, in how we receive and digest it, and how it affects us, both consciously and unconsciously.
During the time this reaction against broadcast television was going on (1967-1970), the established art world was facing some challenges of its own. Many artists found that the traditions of painting and sculpture had arrived at a critical cul-de-sac, and they were searching for other means of ex- pression. In addition, the commercial art world was in the midst of escalating prices and wild buying, a situation further confused by a prevailing indecision about the relative merits of different kinds of art.
One result of this atmosphere of change was the reaction of some artists against the production of art objects: they preferred to work in nonbuyable, nonpossessable media, partly in an attempt to free themselves from the art market as it was then functioning. Consequently, there was an explosion of new kinds of art, most of them either variations on performance, theater, and dance, or mechanically reproducible art forms such as photography, film, and video. Video fell into this art world very neatly. It could be used to record all kinds of performances and actions, enabling them to be repeated again and again. It could either be abstract or representational in its imagery (it was not inherently one or the other), and so side-stepped certain critical dilemmas. A few galleries and museums began to collect tapes, hire curators, and organize exhibitions.
The following discussion is not a comprehensive history of the first years of interest in video as a creative medium, but is rather an attempt to chart some of the ways the energy has flowed and to introduce a few of the more interesting people and situations. In general, one might say that art- making has occurred in three areas of video activ- ity—these are arbitrary divisions, but are useful descriptively. One is the aforementioned realm of electronics research and development. Because of its roots in other twentieth-century graphic tradi- tions, this is often the work most accessible to people first looking at the medium. Examples in- clude the famous “synthesizer” tapes and special effects graphics of many kinds. A second area of activity has been documentary, an area that is currently interesting historians and critics of pho- tography and film as well. The third area is probably the most complex. It includes performances, con- ceptual work and what may be called information- perception pieces. This group includes both video tapes and live video installations that in some way expand the limits of the viewer’s ability to perceive himself or herself in a technologically charged en- vironment.
H I S T O R I C A L N O T E S
Individuals and Small Groups
A few rumblings in the early sixties anticipated the general eruption of interest in the medium later in the decade. NAM JUNE PAIK —
is probably the most famous and certainly one of the most interesting members of the movement; his work is a collage of all three divisions of video activity. He was born in Korea and was educated in Japan and Germany, where he studied philosophy and music. By his own estimate, he has given over 100 performances, which reflect his interest in avant-garde music (John Cage is a major influence) and the Fluxus movement. His first exhibition of television was in Germany in 1963, in which he showed television sets whose off-the-air images were distorted. By 1965, Paik had moved to New York and was having exhibitions here. His work takes many forms—video performances and video FRAME 48 step through next 16 frames
installations as well as video tapes—and shows his interest in process rather than product; the new often has elements carried forward from the old.
Paik has always been on the outer fringes of the movement technically. In 1965, he bought one of Sony’s first portable video tape recorders and dis- played tapes the same night. He was the co-devel- oper, with SHUYA ABE, —
of one of the first video synthesizers. Several people were working on synthesizers in 1968 and 1969 and each machine reflects the desires of its builder. They have in common the ability to produce dazzling color patterns and forms, moving and shifting through time. The Paik-Abe synthesizer is the per- fect tool for Paik’s work—it takes black-and-white camera images and mixes and colorizes them, pro- ducing dense, often layered, brilliantly colored frag- ments.
Paik’s basic style is one that has become familiar in this century, a collage of juxtaposed pieces of information wrenched out of their original contexts. His taped work constantly reshuffles bits and pieces of material from all over the world—a Korean drum- mer in action, Japanese Pepsi commercials, go-go dancers, tapes of his own performances with cellist CHARLOTTE MOORMAN. —
He has spoken of how we live in an age of informa- tion overkill; his fast-paced, disjunct, percussive tapes heighten and intensify this barrage of image and sound. The effect is jolting. Paik makes the viewer stop and think, and he does this not only in his performances and tapes: his production of enig- matic, deadpan aphorisms is second only to Andy Warhol’s in the world of art. “I would rather be corrupted than repeat the sublime,” he said with a chuckle during a televised interview with Russell Connor and Calvin Tompkins.
ERIC SIEGEL —
was another forerunner. He began building TV sets in high school and has continued building video equipment ever since. He was also the builder of an
early video synthesizer, and another tool, his col- orizer, has been used by half the artists in the country who want color in their tapes. Siegel’s own work ranges from an early special-effects tape of Einstein to more recent personal documentary tapes. A third early experimenter, and one who has remained steadfastly independent of any group affiliation, is Les Levine. In 1968, after he had been working with video tape for some time, he presented the first public showing of his work. As the audience watched his prerecorded video tapes on such sub- jects as the destruction of art and the nude model, they could also watch their own reactions on a closed-circuit monitor: Levine had a camera in the room. This is typical of his work—Levine is not interested in traditional aesthetics, but with televi- sion environments, with the movement of informa- tion within physical and temporal limits. He was quoted in a New York Times review as saying that he hoped to help people form new images of themselves by showing them their reactions to what they see. “They’ll change as they note their responses to various situations presented on the tapes. . . . If you see yourself looking self-conscious, for example, you’ll be forced to think why.”
Also in 1968, Levine produced his first “televi- sion sculpture,” Iris. Once again, Levine had the viewer confronting himself via television. In this case, all the hardware for the closed-circuit system was contained in one eight-foot-tall sculpture-con- sole. Standing in front of this console, the viewer faced six monitors and three concealed video cam- eras. The cameras shot the space in front of the console, and presented views of the environment in close-up, middle distance, and wide angle. Each of these cameras had its own monitor and the three others provided distorted images that might or might not be recognizable. Thus, a viewer standing in front of the console could see three different views of himself juxtaposed with other random video information.
In this early work, Levine opened an examination of television as an information system of great flexibility and complexity. This aspect of the me- dium has been further explored with increasing subtlety and sophistication by several artists in the years since Levine made Iris.
By 1968, inexpensive portable equipment was becoming widely available. During the next year or so, various people bought cameras and video tape FRAME 060
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recorders (portapaks) and experimented with them alone or in small groups. A group of graduating college seniors in Santa Clara, California, was typi- cal: one of them had invested in a portapak, and he and his friends used it so constantly that it finally wore out. Most of that group have continued their interest in video, and two will be discussed later— George Bolling, who is the video curator at the de Saisset Art Gallery in Santa Clara and introduced a whole generation of San Francisco artists to the medium, and Skip Sweeney, who co-founded Video Free America, a San Francisco group that, among other things, sponsored some of the earliest video theater.
In New York, Commediation appeared. It was the first of a long series of video groups to emerge. David Cort, Frank Gillette, Ken Marsh, and Howie Gut- stadt were members, and like many people initially attracted to the medium, they were primarily inter- ested in video as a tool for social change. A little of David Cort’s history may help to illuminate the motives of many people working in video.
Cort had originally been involved in the theater, but the late 1960’s found him working at the Brook- lyn Children’s Museum, involved in antipoverty outreach programs.
I got started in documentary work in political things, attempting to bring together divergent peoples. . . . I was overwhelmed by the lightness of the video camera, the intimacy of it, the way you could talk from behind the camera to people and they could talk to you looking at the camera. The camera was like a funnel through which you could work. You could move in, and be intimate and close.
Cort was impressed with the flexibility of the me- dium, and dissatisfied with how it was used in broadcast:
I look at TV and it’s so passive. “Feed me information, tell me what to feel, tell me what to believe, and I’ll sit there and take it in.” Walter Cronkite tells you what to believe.
...I’d rather have lots of different individuals in- volved, so you would have a lot of different view- points, ideas, instead of one. Walter Cronkite tries to tell you that he has no viewpoint, that he’s objective; “That’s the way it is.” The whole story is held
together by his personality; it centers around him. I found that to be uninteresting.
Cort was further disenchanted with TV because of an uncomfortable experience he and his wife had had on a daytime TV show. They had felt over- whelmed, humiliated, and manipulated, and the experience influenced Cort’s own work:
It has become a basic esthetic. It’s like a rule. When- ever I work in video, everybody I work with has to have a feed, has to see what’s going on. Nothing can be hidden. One of the things I object to most about journalism is that people come in and they take your picture, and you don’t know what they’re taking. They may play it back to you afterwards, but that’s not the same as seeing it while it’s there.
He goes on to say:
You know, I think a lot of people are in video because they have no choice—it’s so overwhelmingly around you. It’s almost like a responsibility that you have to take, that you have to work with it because it’s all- pervasive. We are confronted with this alien, cold equipment and we are to make something human, to involve the human being in it in some way, to make him active, to make him participate. At one and the same time you want to control it and you want to destroy it, you want to remove it and get back to the romantic, but you can’t. So you are faced with it and you have to do something with it that will be fun, that will be joyous, that will be human rather than antihu- man, that will be positive.
It is exciting to hear conversations about the first few months of experimentation. In New York City, people carrying portapaks bumped into each other on the street or at parties and got to know each other; the famous concert at Woodstock in 1969 was yet another meeting place. Many video groups formed quite rapidly, and often just as rapidly some of them dissolved, but the cast of characters remained remarkably constant. Most of them, as was the case with the group in San Francisco, are still at the heart of the medium today: Ira Schneider, Frank Gillette, David Cort, Beryl Korot, Ken Marsh, John Reilly, Rudi Stern, Parry Teasedale, Michael Shamberg, to mention only a few of them.
part of a gallery installation; in 1968, he started to record his performances on video tape. And so, by the end of the first year of activity in the medium, several different uses had already been established: synthesizers were being constructed to produce new electronic imagery, documentary tapes were being made, and the medium was beginning to be explored by conceptual artists to record perform- ances and gestures.
In 1969, artists who were not already acquainted found themselves looking at each other’s work at the first large gallery exhibition, “Television as a Creative Medium,” a display that was organized by Howard Wise. Wise has been one of the staunchest supporters of electronic arts in general, and video in particular. He has subsequently relinquished his Fifty-seventh Street gallery in order to support video full time, and is currently one of the largest distribu- tors of artists’ video tapes. At his Fifth Avenue headquarters, Electronic Arts Intermix, he also provides an open-access editing facility for artists. At his 1969 show, he gathered together video tapes and sponsored installations; the artists got to know each other, and several new video groups formed as a result. Also in 1969, WGBH-TV broadcast the first video “sampler,” a half-hour program showing the work of six artists.
Video activity, by 1970, seemed to have all marks of a fullfledged art movement: there was a large museum show, a movement magazine appeared, art critics got involved, and official funding agencies were interested. First there was the exhibition at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, organized